posted on Thursday, July 08, 2010 12:43 PM
Virtualization has provided a significant boon to enterprise data center operations. Not only has OS virtualization enabled organizations to consolidate and curb the growth of server hardware, but provided a means to reduce power and cooling costs that had become a major component of operating expense. It has also increased the efficiency of enterprise IT, giving them the ability to provision new servers in minutes instead of weeks or months. Virtualization is certainly here to stay.
Virtualization alone, however, is not enough to enable organizations to realize the true potential of on-demand IT and bridge traditional IT operation with the ever-present notion of the dynamic data center or cloud computing principles. While provisioning new servers has become almost instantaneous, a new server by itself does little for the organization. In order to provide value, the infrastructure must be made aware of the new server, what application it serves and be appropriately configured to deliver user requests to the new service. This still requires a great deal of manual, time-consuming effort which can be fraught with mis-configurations and unintentional consequences. This is all simply to bring a new server online, but the ideals of the dynamic data center and cloud computing require the transparent decommission or de-provisioning of services as well as provisioning. This, again, requires excessive manual intervention and process.
The dynamic data center is, currently, only as dynamic as the administrators ability to monitor and maintain the complex configurations that interconnect the users to the application.
F5 has always focused on ensuring that users and applications are reliably and securely connected in the most optimal manner. The suite of BIG-IP solutions provide numerous ways to ensure the non-stop, efficient delivery of applications and one of the best ways to do that is to partner and work closely with the developers of the most widely used enterprise applications. These partnerships enable F5 to create unique, out-of-the-box solutions that directly support the applications enterprises use and adds to the efficiency of deploying the architecture to support the reliable, secure and optimal delivery of
those applications.
F5 offers a solution portfolio with both physical and virtual deployment options, providing comprehensive integration with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, and more. Integration with Microsoft’s new Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit reduces the time required to deploy new virtual machines, and simplifies integral functionality such as virtual application provisioning, reconfiguration of network traffic, and holistic health monitoring.
These integrations, enabled in no small part by F5’s iControl interface, now bridge the gap between virtual machine creation and dynamic data center infrastructure configuration. Microsoft’s management tools can now include real-time performance and user information from F5’s BIG-IP products in determining when virtual machines should be added or removed from operation. Furthermore, this integration enables enterprise administrators to create workflows that not only create virtual machines and apply the appropriate software and configurations, but also intrinsically include the configuration of F5 solutions to dynamically add or remove those virtual machines from the active set of severs handling users requests. With the existing application profiles F5 has previously developed in conjunction with Microsoft for things like SharePoint and Exchange, the workflow process can not only connect users to the right applications, but also ensure that they are consistently delivered reliably, securely and in the most optimal manner.
F5 is the first ADN partner in Microsoft Dynamic Data Center Alliance and one of the “founding” network partners. Through this alliance and other partnership efforts, F5 plans to further work with Microsoft on solutions that promote the companies’ shared vision of dynamic IT infrastructure.
Latest F5 Information
